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Epic Battle Fantasy 4, Postmortem 2

Hey, since my new turn-based RPG, Epic Battle Fantasy 5, is 99% finished, I think this is a good time to write about the previous game in the series. I wrote a postmortem of Epic Battle Fantasy 4 back in 2013, and things were not looking so optimistic at the time. Here’s a continuation of that story.

—The Story so Far—

EBF4 was well-recieved by players and got very high scores on Flash game sites, and the premium content for the game sold quite well on Kongregate. However, even with millions of plays, the game didn’t have the same viral appeal that EBF3 had – and the biggest part of that was that the Flash game industry was rapidly shrinking. EBF4 paid off it’s development costs, but only due to lucky timing – if it had been released just a bit later, it would have had trouble getting sponsored, and may have flopped completely. I worked on EBF4 on and off for a few years, but the final development time was probably around a year of full-time work, and in the end it made $60K, which is decent for a software developer in a cheap city. Making another big game for Flash sites was no longer an option though.

While EBF4 was nearing the end of development, I started thinking about Steam. Games like Binding of Isaac and VVVVVV made me realise that good Flash games might be allowed on the platform. Luckily, Greenlight was announced around the same time, and it seemed like Steam was the way forward for the types of games I was making. But getting through Greenlight was incredibly hard at the time – initially your game would need over 50K votes or so, and only a handful of games were selected each month. EBF4 sat on Greenlight for a few months, and seeing that it was never going to get that many votes, I wrote the 1st postmortem, and decided I may be doomed to make lame mobile games, or some other career path. And now, some 5 or so years later, it’s time to continue the story…

—Preparing for Steam—

After 5 or 6 months, Valve started Greenlighting many more games than before, and EBF4 had a chance again! I immediately started working on new content for the Steam version of the game (which I also added to the paid Kongregate version), and EBF4 finally got through Greenlight, with around 15K votes. (For comparison, in the final days of Greenlight, all you needed was somewhere between 500 and 1K votes) Kongregate was a great sponsor, and they allowed me to link to Steam Greenlight in the web version of EBF4. I kept their logo on the Steam version, but they were not involved in it – I had no sponsor or publisher this time.

Steam was terrifying at first, since it was the first time I was publishing on a platform that wasn’t specifically designed for Flash games. It’s also very lonely, as you can go through the whole process of launching a game on Steam without ever talking to a human from Valve! I was worried I would not be able to implement all of the steam features – achievements, cloud saving, overlay, fullscreen modes, and trading cards. My time at University prepared me for situations like this – when you’re stuck on an assignment, you’re forced to talk to other students and to find out who’s better at it than you are, so you can get some help. I hunted down the developers of all the Flash games on Steam, and most of them were very happy to share their solutions with me. A huge thanks goes out to Alexey Abramenko, developer of Intrusion 2, who suggested I use MDM Zinc (basically a Flash projector) to package EBF4, and let me use his code for Steam achievements.

While I’m at it, I’d also like to thank Amanita Design, developers of Machinarium, for sharing their FRESteamworks ANE, which allows Adobe AIR to interface with Steam features. I later used Adobe AIR for other games I released on Steam, but it was no good for EBF4, since for some bizarre reason, Adobe decided to remove the LOW and MEDIUM stage quality options, which would have drastically damaged the game’s performance. (I eventually found a workaround for this, and will be using Adobe AIR for EBF5) Anyway, MDM Zinc worked very well for a couple of years – it got my little Flash game running on and interfacing with Steam. But in the end the company closed down and stopped all support for it, and I’m no longer able to update EBF4 on Steam unless I update it to use Adobe AIR instead, and I don’t have a huge desire to revisit old work.

In the end the only Steam feature I couldn’t get working was the Steam overlay! It turns out this is because regular Flash content isn’t hardware accelerated, and the overlay cannot appear if the GPU is not active. The FRESteamworks ANE has a handy workaround for this problem – it creates a single off-screen hardware-accelerated sprite, which allows the overlay to be updated. Oh well, I found out about that a bit late.

—Time to Launch—

Anyway, onto the Steam release! I expected a lot of pushback from Steam users that are angry about Flash games showing up on Steam, but there was only a few of those, and the game was incredibly well recieved, with a review score of 98% positive for almost its entire lifetime.

There’s definitely a lot to criticise about EBF4 – it runs traditional Flash content with vector graphics, which even if programmed perfectly, would take up a lot of CPU resources. But there’s also a major memory leak in the game on top of that! I limited the game’s resolution to a max of only 720p, because I know most users would go as high as possible and then be surprised at how badly the game runs. The game was never designed to be played in widescreen, so the aspect ratio is an awkward 4:3. (apparently I was one of the last people with 4:3 monitors, and thought this was still normal)

I’m going to speculate here about why I think EBF4 got past these issues. First of all, I think I was very honest on the store page about what the game was offering. The trailer is just standard-definition footage from the game. Anyone who is expecting technical brilliance or mature-looking graphics, would instantly back away from the game. But more than that, I think the vast majority of people who bought the game were fans of the series from the good old Flash days – my art style hasn’t changed in 10 years, and anyone who’s played my games or seen my animations on Newgrounds or Armor Games will recognise them instantly. With EBF3 alone having over 20 million plays across the web, there was bound to be a lot of Steam users who had played the earlier games on Flash sites before finding EBF4 on Steam. Maybe nostalgia for Flash games is a real thing now.

But Flash does have some unique advantages. For one, it’s incredibly compatible – no matter what your hardware is, it will most likely run on it, even if it doesn’t run well. Only a small handful of players had trouble running the game at all. It’s also very easy to decompile Flash games, which most would consider a weakness, but this turned into a very helpful tool for hobbyists who create wiki pages, and some players would even find bugs in my code for me! Unofficial Chinese and Russian translations were even made! (EBF4 was actually the first game I localised into different languages, and here’s a blog I wrote about that.)

Maybe the game would have been more successful if it was made in a modern engine, but in my opinion, the risks and costs of learning a new engine and rebuilding the game would have outweighed any potential benefits. Working with Flash allows me to limit scope-creep, because I can’t get carried away with fancy graphics or new features, and I am able to guarantee that I will finish my games, no matter what. (unless I’m killed) I prefer to jump straight into prototypes and development, rather than thoroughly learning new tech, so I’m still not in a hurry to ditch Flash, even in 2019. I might be the last guy still using it for Steam games.

—Big Sales—

The opening day was strong – EBF4 got into the top 20 bestselling Steam games for a few hours! But after a few days, things began to settle down, and I thought that was it. I was used to the Flash game lifespan, where games only get major attention for a week or two, and then fade away after that. I was not expecting the long sales tail that would follow. But even so, the sales so far were just barely enough to make the extra content and Steam launch worthwhile.

I got a lot of emails from game bundles, asking me to take part in them. I was an inexperienced Steam dev, but even at the time I knew it was not a good sign to send your game into the bargain bin a few months after launch. (though the game was over a year old in my view, if you include the web version, so maybe…?) I picked carefully and chose a very small and obscure bundle group, called Blink Bundle, (I don’t think they exist anymore) and EBF4 sold 5K copies there. It was a nice little introduction to bundles – it didn’t result in any user engagement, and didn’t change anything in the long term, as far as I could tell. But I did panic a bit, and swore not to bundle the game again unless sales had completely dried up, or I was approached by Humble Bundle.

Some time in its first year on Steam, EBF4 was featured in a flash sale (anyone still remember those?) and this was possibly the most exciting day of my game dev career. I got news in the morning that it was featured, and went out hiking for the day. When I got back and checked the sales stats, I thought they were broken, because the graph was just a backwards “L” shape. I can’t be too specific about the numbers, but the sale had quadrupled the number of Steam owners so far, and that allowed EBF4 to get enough traction to start getting picked up by Steam’s recommendation algorithms. (getting over 500 reviews is a major milestone for the algorithms) That’s also when I decided I could actually make EBF5 someday!

In 2016, sales of EBF4 were starting to wind down. But then Steam introduced the discovery update, which introduced smarter game recommendations, and made it easier for players to find niche products. Top selling games were featured less prominently than before, and much more indie games were promoted throughout the store – if that’s what a user was interested in. Since then, EBF4′s day-to-day sales have remained strong and fairly constant, only decreasing slightly over time. There have been a few occasions when Steam’s algorithms decided to stop promoting the game, and sales would drop by up to half, but luckily these have all been temporary – so far. Most indie games really are at the mercy of Steam’s algorithms and policies, which are changing often.

At the start of 2017, Humble Bundle approached me to include EBF4 in their Overwhelmingly Positive Bundle, along with some very well known games like Shantae and N++. The results were as good as I could have hoped for – huge sales and very low customer engagement. Around 135K people bought EBF4, only 90K bothered to activate it, only a fraction of those played it, and just a handful actually left reviews. Those new reviews averaged to around 75% positive, so it’s good that there wasn’t enough of those to damage my overall score very much. It goes to show you the dangers of showing your game to a much less invested audience.

Thanks to the bundle, and to Brexit for plummeting the value of British currency, that turned into my best financial year ever. I hadn’t even published any games that year, so it’s funny how things sometimes turn out. Game dev sometimes feels more like a lottery than a job.

EBF4 still has no critic reviews on Metacritic, and has never been covered by a major YouTuber or gaming news site. I’ve never paid for any advertisements. I had no marketting plan, I just made free web games for 5 years, (they were still very profitable) and it looks like many of the kids who played them are now adults who want to support me.

—Conclusion—

As of now, EBF4 has sold around 255K copies across all platforms, with around 140K of those being from bundles. It ended up earning many times more than the initial web version! It’s also worth noting that 75% of the game is still available for free online – I do wonder how a free Steam version would have affected the numbers?

To this day EBF4 is still selling around 7 or 8 copies on an average day, and a lot more during seasonal Steam sales. 5 years after it launched on Steam, it’s still covering my living expenses. Thanks to this I was able to work full time on EBF5 for 3 whole years! (but not without stress of course, as income like that could stop without warning if Steam decides to change something. I’ve recently started a Patreon as an emergency source of income) (I’d also like to mention that my living expenses are only £15K per year – with an unstable income like game dev, you gotta save a lot)

I think it would be a miracle if EBF5 saw the same success as EBF4 did. (even though development time was more than double…) With some luck, maybe it will come close. I’m definitely more prepared this time, as this will be my 4th game on Steam, and based on various social media stats, there’s around 10K people following EBF5′s development. I’ll also be sending out discount coupons to everyone who owns EBF4 on Steam, which should make for some good marketting, and I’m planning to release a free web version of EBF5 on the usual Flash sites, some time after the Steam release.

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66 thoughts on “Epic Battle Fantasy 4, Postmortem 2”

Congratulations on your success as a game developer, Matt Roszak! I really love your games. I don’t know if you remember when I talked about potential NPC characters and stuff, but that was just me thinking about my own characters that I have had for years. I had a fantastic time playing the EBF5 Demo on this website, and am planning to buy the full version on Steam very soon! To be honest, I am thinking seriously about developing a game called, “Prodragonists of Drakerin”. If I ever manage it, you will certainly be one of the people I devote it to! I apologize for not sending you money every month, but I have had a lot going on. I have a friend who can probably help me develop it, as he made a horro game a while back called “Blank Dream”. I don’t know how widespread it was, but he sent it to my computer for me to play. His name is Samuel Salcedo, also known as mordecai, and we may be able to develop it together. Thanks for reading. Good luck!

I never read the first postmortem, but this was some very interesting insight. I remember playing EBF3 and EBF4 on Newgrounds way back in the day and indeed when I saw EBF4 on Steam I quickly purchased it. Been a 1$ Patron for almost a year now too, and I am super glad I could help in even a tiny way. I greatly look forward to EBF5, both in terms of playing it for dozens of hours and seeing just how successful it becomes!

Thank you for posting such an in depth look at your experiences using Steam and everything that goes with it, I may not be a big YouTuber but I really hope that my coverage of EBF4 helped you in some small way, and hoping even more that EBF5 will be even more successful for you! Thanks for always making amazing games, you can be sure that I’ll be playing your games as long as you keep making them!

Good luck on the sales of EBF5! I for one will be buying it the moment I have money. Once it’s released and you get a long well-deserved break, I will start dreaming that one day you could make an Epic Battle Fantasy Tactics.

I’ll be sure to buy EBF 5 when the game comes out. To be fairly honest, I never expected you to have this big of a struggle (well, sort of) when it came to EBF 4. At first, I figured you would’ve had your whole life at the top, but I guess kid me didn’t get that before I learned more about Flash Games and how poorly they handle nowadays. Either way, it has been a great couple of years, and I surely can’t wait to see what amazing plans you got for the future

As a long time fan, I can’t wait to play this game, and have plans on streaming it when it goes live and when I get the chance to. Should make for a much better video than my EBF4 vids (since it wasn’t a blind playthrough )

As a person who is looking to get a career in the video game industry, I found this little look back to be a very interesting post. It certainly isn’t as easy as many dream of it being. But I’m very glad you stuck with it. Thanks for the good times.

Also, You can definitely count on me buying a full version when it releases. I was happy with what I tested out in the demo build (had to stop myself somewhere in the castle area cause I want to do a big playthrough of the full game). Really like the new summon system, though its tricky to capture some of the biggest targets early on without killing them on accident.

Super psyched for the game. As one of those kids who played the games and recently became an adult that can suport you I’ll finally have a chance for doing so, which feels really nice. Congratulations on your new game, I hope it does well.

Hey Matt, long time fan here! I’ve been around since the newgrounds animations days and it was interesting to here your thoughts on the sales and whatnot of EBF4! I’m really excited for EBF5 to be released on steam, and you can guarantee that its going to be a day one pick up from me. Keep up the good work!

No disrespect to Kupo or his games but some realism I feel is required:

The insights here make for a good read, particularly as commentary on indie game development, but I was not at all surprised by any of them, nor, I hope, were you. Sticking with the same engine/language as well as general style will continue bringing back the same old crowd that were raised on flash game sites, which is fine, as I was among them. (you may even be able to coast off of this income so long as these folks remain gamers and continue to invest in your titles, assuming more are made). Still, it should be obvious that this approach will not bring in significantly wider audiences or boost sales.

So your comments about the difficulty in learning a new programming language aren’t quite in line with your hopes for long-term success, or at least consistent, tangible relevance, as I am led to believe is your desire by the finishing remarks. You yourself acknowledge that Flash is a dying, largely unsupported engine, so it should be clear that its bounds are limited, and worth the investment to try new outlets.

I remain a fan and supporter, just conscious that hope alone doesn’t put food on the table.

Matt, I appreciate and admire how you do not constantly beg for money and live humbly.

After replaying your first games on Andkon Arcade like 5 times I rediscovered your games through the humble bundle. I do not know how you will send discount codes, but I really appreciate that you will, and I will continue recommending your games to my friends! (My lockscreen wallpaper was godcat fanart for a good month)

There are only a handful of games I spend days on end playing and EBF3 & 4 are both games I’ve probably put over 300 hours into (Mostly into EBF4 though, probably about 80 into EBF3) and this game I’m sure will top even EBF4! I’ll have to make time for this game as there is… Another game coming out soon that I’m hyped for too… Anyways I really hope the sales exceed your expectations!

Hello!
I remember all the way back in 4th-5th grade during the summer my friends introduced me to EBF2 and then proceeded to play as much of EBF2 as possible (until be beat it) and then soon we found out about EBF3 (attempted EBF1 but couldn’t beat it). My friends and I chose the characters that we could “control” as if it were multiplayer. No idea how long I spent trying to beat the game in the end I completed the game maybe around like 30+ hours because I was just a little kid who had no idea how to play video games. After beating EBF3 I looked around and found adventure story, brawl royale, and my favorite one, Bullet Heaven (because I loved bullet hells and how challenging they were). A year or two later I found out that EBF4 was released and I had to tell all of my friends. Every morning I would ask my teacher to play on the computer (getting like 30 minutes of playing time each day) and slowly beating EBF4. The school year is close to ending and I finally finish the final boss filled with excitement. After a few years I find out that EBF5 is annouced, but I had to keep it to myself because I moved to a different school with people who had no idea what EBF was. So nearing the end of 2016 in May I find out about EBF4 on steam which included the dlc of battle mountain and the music (which by the way is AMAZING). I play the hell out of EBF4 again just to relive past memories and new ones when playing battle mountain. What was suppose to be a 25 hour games turned into a 125 hour game for me purely because I enjoyed the hell out of that game. After playing that I hear about Bullet Heaven 2 (EBF4.4) and proceed to play that for another 35 hours (on hard because heavenly was too difficult for me). Then here I am today SO excited for EBF5 ( already played 12 hours but trying to wait until it officially releases). I have loved your games since I was small and will definitely help support you and buy EBF5 :D good luck on your sales!

Never know how stressful and hard a game dev’s life could be, but I think I do now.
Thanks for not giving up on your dream and career, and for all the great work you have made for us.
Maybe setting a slightly higher but generally acceptable price for EBF5 would help? Although it doesn’t sound very feasible.

First time posting a comment but I feel like giving a big thank you to you Matt. I’m also one of the people who grew up with your games and it helped me get through high school and it was always a delight to play during computer science or during lunch break, just know that everyone at my High school loved EBF 1-3. In fact I discovered your games through Newgrounds with the first EBF and it hooked me on your games and when they came to Steam I was glad I was able to finally give you money(even if it wasn’t much) for all that enjoyment I had over the years. I’m really looking forward to buying EBF5 and I hope it makes big sales for you, I would pre-order it if I could considering I love this franchise so much. Keep making great games!

I’m sure most people can agree with -”And it looks like many of the kids who played them are now adults who want to support me.” You’ve made a great fanbase by staying the same, yet improving so much. Your current loyal fans will buy the game at release, boosting it into the algorithm. People nowadays are looking for something fresh, something new, and I believe they’ll find that with the masterpiece of ebf5. I’m sure that ebf5 will make some real good money, and new fans will hungrily look to ebf4 for more. You’ll definitely be on the radar soon enough.

I was a huge fan of EBF 3 and 4 and played both on Kongregate, including the premium content. I am definitely looking forward to the release of EBF 5. I´ve been following your blog for almost a year now and pretty much instantly put EBF 5 on my wishlist once it was available on Steam. Reading this valuable insight in a game developer´s perspective, I have to admit I am a bit ashamed to have been so lazy with writing reviews for games, especially smaller games, I found great. Knowing the impact good ratings and especially reviews can have, I promise to leave you a review this time around. Good luck for the final stage of the developement of your game!

Kyaaaa, how exciting! There are No Legs emotes!
Oh, and this postmortem is interesting too. I hope that EBF5 ends up doing well in the winter sale or whatnot. If it’s put on the front page, it’ll get quite the sales tail.

@Matt Roszak
One thing you didn’t mention (that was the main driver in my buying EBF4, at least) was that EBF3 ended up getting offered for free on steam.

I had never played any of these as a kid, and never heard of it, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have spent any money on it if I hadn’t been able to try 3 first. I was bored though, and figured the worst case was I spend 30 minutes and then never touch it again. Instead I found myself actually liking it a lot, and I grabbed EBF4 right afterwards. I was late enough to the party that I then discovered EBF5 was ~60% done or something, and I continue to be very excited and eager to pick it up.

I can’t speak for most of the key demo maybe. But that free earlier game was priceless in getting me onboard.

(Also, interesting read. It’s neat to hear what goes on behind the scenes in indie game dev).

So, any plans for the future after EBF5 releases and you are done with updating it? Will you just keep adding stuff to 5 until you come up with something else? A spin-off? Mobile games?
Personally, I don’t care if it’s EBF (though I would prefer if you kept the artstyle) or even the same genre (I surprisingly enough enjoyed Bullet Heaven 2 even though I’m not really invested into bullet hells), it just has to be a good game and I have no doubts you’ll deliver.

I play my games instead of 7 years old and even today I dont play them because I think their style of play is very good. I have only what to thank for existing I hope to continue and do enough of your next games with your next games that I still follow.

Very nice read. It is always interesting to get some insight from the other side of the asile.

I still remember how randomly I found your games:
I was bored one afternoon, and decided to look for some fun stuff to watch on youtube. Being the lazy POS that I am, I just typed ‘epic battle’ in on google, figuring that it should throw out some epic movie battle scene compilations on youtube (I was thinking of stuff like Narnia, LORT etc.).
Then I saw among the first few hits the title Epic Battle Fantasy 3. Without taking a better look at the link, I clicked it, thinking ‘Great, someone already made at least 3 part of just the stuff I was looking for!’. Not realising that the title kind of made no sense for a video, but my english wasn’t very good back then.
I was a bit disappointed when I saw that it was just some better than average looking flash game. But since it was already loaded, I thought that I can might as well give it a few minutes. it may even turn out to be good.
Then suddenly it was 1AM, and the rest is history.
This was a bit before EBF4 came out IIRC.

Now I have a combined of ~100 hours logged in EBF3 and 4 on steam, and will definitely buy EBF5 within days of release.

I hope EBF5, and any of your other future projects will be just as successful as EBF4 was.

Very insightful, thank you. I’ve only truly played EBF3 and EBF4 (each multiple times of course) but those were my first introduction to good RPGs and definitely are still my favorite flash games. I’ll admit that if I didn’t already know how good your games were (in addition to some nostalgia perhaps) I would very likely skip over your games on Steam. This new era of gamers and games may prefer flashy titles like Fortnite and Overwatch (both FPS games as you may notice, unfortunately Flash games and 2D RPGs are becoming old, and few Flash games are as high-quality as yours). Still I was quite excited a few months back when I checked Kongregate, saw EBF4, and eventually fell down a rabbit hole until I found myself staring at a 95% EBF5 progress bar. Thanks and kudos for your excellent quality work.

Hey, I love your games and all you do but I got EBF4 for steam without thinking before realizing that it didn’t work for mac. Just hoping that a mac version will be released if this is going to be steam only

See one of my recent blogs. It won’t have *official* Mac support, but you can find the Flash file in the installation folder, and that will run on pretty much any platform. So it’s quite a simple workaround.

You said in your last post-mortem that you were getting bored of the ebf series (then back off a lot now realising you were very pessimistic about it),

but then what exactlyl would you have done? Spin-offs or an entire new serie? Because if it’s the last, this sounds interesting! (Well, maybe not if you were talking about creating lames cash-grab mobiles games)

Referring to your first “post mortem” article, I’m wondering why you didn’t use google analytics to collect and analyze the data.
Anyway, thanks for the detailed financial report. Web games are dying since many years and flash will be retired soon (end 2020), also the video games industry has moved to the mobile market because of the better ROI. Nevertheless you stay with flash, isn’t it masochistic? I can understand that you have many years’ experience with it, but wouldn’t be better to create games that can target also the mobile market?
Nowadays there are game engines that allow you to release the same game with only one source code to different platforms. Purely talking from the economic point of view, wouldn’t be for you more strategical to switch to one of these game engines?

Just wanna say Matt, you’ll always have my support for as long as I’m alive and I look forward to throwing money at EBF5! I still really enjoy that video you made showcasing how you designed one of the areas btw.

Eagerly waiting for the final release. I’m pleasantly surprised to hear about the discount coupon if we own the Steam version of EBF4 – I wasn’t expecting that but now it’s just another reason I plan to buy this on release.

EN: Hello, I’ve known your work on Steam, your Epic Battle Fantasy 4 game was featured on Steam promotions, I’ve been addicted to your games ever since, the soundtrack is amazing, everything in this game works fine ^ – ^, you ended up being my inspiration for game developer, since then I have my RPG in 2D, I will definitely buy the EBF5.